Strength Training Can Protect Your Independence as You Age

Rising from a chair should not feel difficult. However, for many older people, ordinary daily actions become progressively harder as muscles deteriorate and lose strength with age - a condition known as sarcopenia.

The effects can accumulate unnoticed: difficulty using stairs, increased hospital admissions and, ultimately, the loss of independent living.

The positive news is that resisting this decline does not require lengthy exercise sessions or intense training. Relatively small amounts of strength training can help preserve muscle and keep you moving confidently.

Creating a muscle buffer

Even brief spells in hospital or immobilisation can seriously affect muscle. In these short periods - often around five days, but sometimes longer - of inactivity and immobilisation, we lose muscle and become weaker.

Unfortunately, replacing that muscle and restoring strength is difficult, especially with advancing age. Prevention is therefore preferable to treatment. Yet accidents and illnesses cannot always be prevented, which is why it is important to build a buffer - or a "muscle savings account."

There is an uncomfortable reality to accept: periods of immobilisation caused by illness, surgery or injury will result in muscle loss. That loss cannot be avoided. What can be changed is whether you have enough muscle to withstand it.

When your muscle mass is already low, even a modest loss may move you from independence to reliance on others. The same amount of lost muscle may have little impact on a person with greater reserves, while leaving somebody with less muscle unable to manage independently.

This becomes particularly important with age because older adults do not recover in the same way as younger people. A 20-year-old may lose muscle during a hospital stay and regain it within weeks. A 70-year-old may never fully recover it. Building a buffer is not optional, then: it is vital protection for your future independence.

Age-related muscle loss commonly occurs not as a smooth, gradual decline, but as a series of downward steps. You may remain stable for months or years before an event - a fall, surgery or pneumonia - takes you to a lower level. A further incident brings another decline. On each occasion, muscle is lost and is never completely restored.

You may have witnessed this in your own family. "Everything changed after that fall." "Dad was never the same after his knee surgery." The shared pattern behind these accounts is inadequate muscle reserves encountering an unavoidable health setback.

The encouraging point is that this pattern is not fixed. The muscle you develop now can determine whether a later setback is a short-term hurdle or a lasting restriction.

Strength training to maintain muscle

Physical activity - and strength training in particular - is essential for maintaining and increasing both muscle mass and strength. Strength training involves lifting resistance, whether through dumbbells, exercise machines or resistance bands.

Staying active as we grow older, through walking, gardening and similar activities, matters greatly for heart and brain health and can help prevent type 2 diabetes. Strength training, though, provides several distinct benefits.

Lifting weights and undertaking other resistance exercises develops power and strength. These qualities are important for everyday tasks such as climbing stairs, lifting a heavy bag of shopping and reducing the risk of falls. In this regard, resistance training cannot be replaced.

Nevertheless, just 42 per cent of Canadians aged over 65 meet strength training guidelines. This leaves many people exposed to the muscle loss that can turn routine daily activities into a challenge.

Heavy versus lighter weights: is a little enough?

Some people may think, "Lifting heavy weights in a gym full of muscular young folks is just not for me, thanks." But what if maintaining - or even building - muscle did not require lifting heavy weights?

Our research, along with that of other researchers, repeatedly shows that heavy weights are not necessary to increase muscle and strength. Heavier loads provide a small advantage for strength improvements, but lighter weights are also highly effective - sufficiently so to make a meaningful difference to everyday life.

One useful way to judge whether a weight is heavy enough is to check whether you feel fatigued after 20-25 repetitions. If you can complete more than 25 repetitions, you should probably choose slightly heavier weights. The appropriate weight will differ between individuals and can also change over time.

There is further encouraging evidence: Stuart Phillips' exercise metabolism research group at McMaster University found that one weekly lighter-weight strength training session can build both muscle and strength.

Additional sessions do deliver quicker improvements, but the key dividing line is not between adequate and excellent - it is between none and one. One session each week can move you from losing muscle to making gains, creating the buffer that helps protect independence as you get older.

Bear in mind that 20-25 repetitions is likely to be the ideal range for strength training with lighter weights. Performing fewer repetitions may not produce the same benefits.

To get the greatest benefits from lighter weights, you will eventually need to train to voluntary failure. This means continuing until you can no longer perform the exercise with proper form.

However, beginners should not be concerned about this immediately. Your initial workout does not have to be flawless or exhausting. It simply has to take place. Once confidence and consistency grow, you can increase the effort.

Getting started may also be more straightforward than expected. With a simple set of dumbbells or resistance bands, you can begin at home today, without paying for a gym membership or facing intimidating equipment.

The message is straightforward: one weekly strength session is better than none. Lighter weights are better than no weights. Beginning imperfectly is better than never beginning. Every bit of muscle buffer you develop now, even slowly, offers protection against the loss associated with age and illness.

Your future self - still able to climb stairs and carry shopping independently - will be grateful that you started today.

Tom Janssen, PhD candidate, McMaster University and Matthew Lees, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Kinesiology, McMaster University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.